


U. S. S. Bill of Rights

by melannen



Series: U.S.S. Bill of Rights-verse [1]
Category: Pundit RPF, Star Trek, Star Trek - Various Authors, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Space, Crossover, Fusion, Gen, PRT+1 - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-14
Updated: 2009-05-13
Packaged: 2017-10-04 08:14:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melannen/pseuds/melannen





	1. Chapter 1

It's not that Jim Kirk dislikes Captain Maddow. She's very, very good at what she does - given Starfleet's still-shameful transparent aluminum ceiling, she wouldn't have made Starship Captain if she wasn't, and she's had ample time to prove it since. And he's fairly sure she gets him in a way even most other captains don't - he checked her Academy records once; her Kobayashi Maru results are the only ones other than his that are sealed even against field command officers. And she's never been anything other than glad to see him when they're assigned to the same mission.

It's just that - afterward, he always has to put in at least one evening's quality time with Dr. McCoy's stock of Saurian brandy.

(He made the mistake - once, and despite her science officer's desperate "Bad idea! Bad idea!" sign language - of inviting her along. She took one look, said, "Really? You're drinking Saurian brandy straight?", and then proceeded to invade McCoy's drinks collection, do some absolutely obscene things to the sick bay synthesizers, and spend the rest of the evening lecturing them, with demonstrations, about cross-planetary parallelisms in drink-mixing traditions. Before she went off with a rather tipsy Nurse Chapel and didn't reappear until morning. Kirk is never again going to be able to look at a gin'n'tonic without wincing, and McCoy actually stopped drinking mint juleps for over a year.)

It just that - he's never, ever going to get to sleep with her. And he keeps remembering that fact.


	2. Chapter 2

The first thing new crewmembers on the Bill of Rights learn is "Don't Ask About the Ears". Everybody knows, of course, that Vulcans are supremely logical and perfectly in control of their emotions, and that despite his stern demeanor, Dr. Stehpan is friendly and fair. Just - don't ask about the ears.

Sometimes it's whispered in corners that Vulcans have a very strong privacy taboo, and any breach of the privacy veil will be punished by death. Some say that the reason Vulcans master their emotions is that if anything triggers a loss of control, they go into a killing rage. And so you don't ask about the ears.

The sickbay staff still tell each other the legend about how Nurse Bobby asked about the ears once, and then he got eaten. (Sure, there was an invisible bugblatter beast loose on the ship at the time, but they're pretty sure it was because he asked about the ears.)

There's a rumor among the ensigns that Ensign Meg knows. Whether she got it from him, or overhead something, or broke into the ship's computer - the most audacious of the rumors says she that when she was posted to Enterprise, she asked Commander Spock - but whatever it is, she won't talk. If asked, she mutely just shakes her head.

And if you happen to wander into the observation deck, or recreation, or the officers' lounge, and see Lieutenant Stewart petting them -- just back out. Back out, and pretend you were never there.


	3. Chapter 3

Lieutenant Keith Olbermann is the first Starfleet officer in history to become Science Officer of a Starship by way of the Recreation department, and he did it mostly by accident.

He hadn't planned a Starfleet career at all, but after a paper he co-wrote as a child about statistical trends in his home planet's competitive sports was picked up by Federation newsfeeds, Lieutenant T'Leiar of Starship Intrepid encouraged him to enter Starfleet as a rec officer, and shortly thereafter, he enlisted. (In later tellings, it is occasionally implied that he had an urgent need to be off-planet at the time; but there is no evidence to back this up.)

For about a decade thereafter, he served as recreation staff on several Starfleet vessels, mostly small courier and scientific ships. His service record shows consistently high performance ratings, but frequent reports of insubordination, including one Thranx commanding officer who accused him of having "too much backbone" and several suggestions along the lines of "if he's Recreation, he needs to learn to relax," and he changed posting slightly more frequently than average for someone of his experience.

He recieved his lieutenant's commission concomitant with his appointment as sole recreation officer on the last exploration mission of the tiny U.S.S. T'challa, and after a succesful tenure on that ship, was posted to Enterprise, second to Lieut. Commander Harb Tanzer.

This marked both the best and the most volatile period in his life; he bonded immediately with Tanzer, and the two of them proceeded to make life hell for the senior officers while raising Enterprise's efficiency and retention numbers to an all-time high for the fleet, and he received several commendations for his work. However, increasing personality clashes with other officers (which perhaps reached a high point when CMO Dr. Leonard McCoy banned him from sickbay entirely during Alpha shift,) and problems with disagreements over the limits of a Rec officer's role culminated in the incident on Alpha Carietis Seven and his re-assignment, with a desk promotion, to Starfleet Command.

(Scotty was the one who piloted the shuttle taking him to the starbase. "Lad," he chortled to himself, "I've heard of folks burning their bridges behind them, but I've never heard of anyone burning up the entire river before!"

"It was a methane river," Keith muttered, still sulking.

"Yes, but lad, the atmosphere had no oxygen." Scott shook his head. "That's one for the books, all right.")

He remained at the desk job for about a year, but found himself deeply resenting the work, and was considering retirement when word was put out that Command was having difficulty finding an experienced XO willing to serve under newly-minted Captain Maddow of the Constitution-class Bill of Rights. Olbermann put his name forward, and Command, more than happy to place two troublemakers on the same boat, gave him the assignment.

They shortly came to regret that decision.


	4. Chapter 4

Captain's stripes on that uniform are - well, actually there's only one person in Starfleet who wears a uniform like that, and she had to bully her Chief of Ops into reprogramming a replicator to make it for her. Oh, it's completely regulation, don't get me wrong, but promising female cadets still get steered out of Command track ("Why waste your career in Command when no woman has ever made Starship Captain? Better off going in to Ops or Science, where you might make Department Head and get command in emergencies.") And the few that push through despite it all always choose to wear the uniform with trousers, once they're high enough rank to get the choice.

Rachel wore the trousers uniform, too. Until her first real command, acting Captain of the science cruiser Shen Kuo while Captain Summers was on a research sabbatical. In her first week, she was approached by terrified but determined Yeoman Cho, asking if she could please be reassigned, because her lieutenant kept looking at her, and making her climb Jeffries tubes for spurious reasons, and pick things up off the floor, and it's true that Captain Summers had always said there was nothing officially inappropriate about it, but it made her really uncomfortable, so would Captain Maddow maybe transfer her to Maintenance? She liked cleaning sewage converters, really.

Rachel considers that her first real command decision. And she walked onto the bridge the next morning with a new personal yeoman, and a new uniform, and sat down in the Captain's chair, and crossed her leg over her knee, and just dared anyone to say anything about it.

When she wore the miniskirt six months later to her promotional hearing, after wearing it through that thing with the Orion pirates and the Omozdian cricket plague and the barely-averted disaster at Harrapa, she smiled sweetly, and the assembled (white, male) Admirals didn't dare say anything about it either. They stuck strictly to her record, and she walked out of that room with Captain's stripes and command of a Constitution-class starship. She hasn't looked back since.

(Then, once she officially wasn't in command of Shen Kuo anymore, she asked Yeoman Cho out for a proper night on the town, and was grinning irrepressibly for weeks afterward.)


	5. Chapter 5

Rachel Maddow was born on a small colony planet, and while she was a small child, it suffered first a disastrous plague and then an attempted genocide. She's always been painfully aware that the only reason she survived was that she was young enough that the Executioner couldn't know she was an undesirable, and that's a large part of the reason she joined Starfleet - to make sure that no one ever had the opportunity to do something like that again.

It gave her a drive, at the Academy, that made her stand out even among the other bright young people who were Starfleet officer cadets, and it gave her the anger to push her way into Command track, and stay there right up until the end. She failed her first test in her last semester at the Academy - the test called Kobayashi.

Despite losing her ship she performed admirably in command, and made the test last almost nine minutes with minimal loss of life. Her instructors had only compliments for her handling of both the scenario and its fallout, which is why Commander Constrev was surprised to find her the next day in the library, researching the history and theory of the test. He wasn't too worried, as there was almost nothing to be found; but it was less than a decade since the reign of the infamous Kirk, and it was standard policy to keep track of a cadet's activities for the weeks after the test.

She noticed him looking over her shoulder and glanced up. "This says it's possible to re-take the Kobayashi maru."

"Yes," he told her, "but very few cadets do, and to be honest, I hadn't expected you to be one of them. I want to reassure you that your score on that test didn't bring down your class rankings, if that's been worrying you."

She waved away the whole notion of class rankings with a negligent hand. "No, I'm just trying to figure out what it would benefit me to re-take the test. I did everything right, according to my post-simulation debriefing, and yet still lost; what could I do differently going in? And more importantly, why wouldn't they at least change the basic set-up of the problem for a re-take, if the idea of the test is to assess a cadet's reaction to a novel situation?"

Constrev blinked. "The idea behind the test may not be what you believe it to be, Rachel."

Rachel rolled her eyes. "I know exactly what they're trying to do; to they think it's not obvious? The whole point is power. As long as they control the simulator, they have all the power, and there's nothing I can do to save my ship. So the point of the test must be to see how a command cadet reactions in a situation where he's completely powerless. Cadets are used to being smarter, stronger and more privileged than those around them, from good families and politically powerful planets; take away that automatic assumption of power, and see who melts."

"I'm not entirely sure that power differential is how the commandant would characterize--"

"Of course it's about power," said Rachel. "It always comes down to power. The thing they may have missed is that being on the wrong side of a power differential isn't a novel situation for me. It's my life. The problem isn't how to deal with it, it's how to change it."

Constrev came away from that conversation disquieted, but Rachel stopped her researches into the Kobayashi Maru and seemed to have become fully absorbed in a comms project she and Cadet Uhura were working on involving signals leakage and detection, so when he was told several weeks later that the cadet had requested a re-take, he was suprised but saw no real reason to be concerned. Rachel tended to be thorough and meticulous with her sources; it was entirely possible she simply wanted to check her work.

And it did, at first, seem like an entirely ordinary run. "Captain" Maddow requested confirmation of a distress call in the Neutral Zone, verified that there were no other ships in communications range, notified Starfleet of her intentions and crossed the border with shields up and crew on high alert, only to be immediatly surrounded by a squadron of Klingon Warbirds.

She blinked, nodded, and politely requested Uhura, on comms, to open a channel to the lead Warbird. A growly, mustachioed Klingon captain appeared on screen and immediately declared that, due to her violation of the neutral zone, she surrender or prepare to be destroyed.

That's when things got weird. She sat up, rubbing nervously at her neck, and said "But what if I don't like either of those choices?"

The Klingon captain replied "Do you not see the ships that are surrounding you? Given you situation, you have no choice."

"I see the ships," she said. "But you're a bit arrogant, you know? Maybe there are other factors. Things you don't see. Like the fact that this morning, somewhere in the vicinity of this building, I hid an activated communicator with certain modifications. The second it detects the electrical pattern that signals a ship in this simulation being destroyed, it will send a message to every currently enrolled student at this Academy, informing them that the Kobayashi maru is a fake, designed to be an unwinnable test, and that there's no need to worry about it because everybody fails."

Then she smiled, stretched out her legs, and said "Your turn."

There was dead silence for a few seconds, and then the viewscreen abruptly turned off. Her helmsman turned around and said "Did you really--" but cut out abruptly when she raised an eyebrow at him. And then Cadet Uhura started snickering, quietly, and when a few minutes later power was cut to the whole simulator, a group of high-ranking Admirals came on to the bridge to be greeted by Cadet Maddow swininging around to look at them, and saying calmly, "Ah. So it turns out there wasn't a real Kobayashi Maru after all. That's disappointing."

(There was a disciplinary hearing, of course. Constrev tried to point out that, with Kirk's precedent, it would be extremely unfair to interfere with Maddow's graduation, but apparently merely breaking into and reprogramming the Academy's most secure computer system was nothing, compared to attempting to undermine the authority of the whole Academy before its student body.

Constrev was fairly certain this was the result of the fallacy know as "pride", but attended the hearing to do what he could.

Rachel appeared completely unruffled; when asked for a defense, she pointed out that the guidelines of the simulations allowed for a canditate within the simulation to do anything necessary to achieve success, with no repercussion beyond grades as long as no-one was physically harmed.

"Yes," pointed out Admiral Blitzer, "But the communicator in question wasn't within the simulation, was it?"

"Have you recovered the communicator in question, Admiral?"

"We presume you had a confederate remove the communicator as soon as you'd achieved your objective. And I do hope that wasn't in the nature of a threat, Cadet."

"Have you discovered the confederate, sir?" She glanced up at them through her lashes. "You won't do either - there was no confederate, because there was no communicator. It seemed like an unnecessary risk, given the advantage I held. So unless lying to Klingons in battle is now against the rules of the Service, I am not entirely sure why you've called this hearing."

Costrev caught up to her afterward. He was too curious to resist asking, "Was there really a communicator?"

She glanced at him, and grinned merrily. "Was there really a Kobayashi Maru?"

He drummed his fingers against his leg, and finally said, "Ask James T. Kirk."


End file.
